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MillimeterTest Drive: Intel Nehalem, Part 1
Apr 13, 2009 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Table 1. DV results.
DV Results
I present the results by format, starting with DV. Table 1 shows the results.
If you’re primarily producing short DV-source projects, rendering time doesn’t appear to be a significant problem for you. All the systems except the Pentium D-based xw4300 are fairly adept at producing even the 10-minute project. Though the 191 percent difference between the Z800 and xw4600 looks dramatic, if you’re producing an hour of video a week, the Z800 will save you about 34 minutes a week. Time is money, but it ain’t that much money.
Clearly there’s reason to upgrade if you’re in the single- or dual-processor camp, but if you already have a four-core or faster system, you’ll have to be producing a heck of a lot of DV footage to justify an upgrade. Let’s move on.
Table 2. Results from HDV.
HDV Results
HDV short-project results sang a similar tune, probably because its MPEG-2 scheme is easy to decode and efficient memory-wise, as evidenced by the fact that the 32-bit eight- and four-core workstations pretty much kept up with the 64-bit models.
On the longer project, the Z800’s combination of processing power and data throughput almost doubled the performance of the single core Z400 and handily outpaced that of the xw8600. In this regards, I should mention that for the Z800 review, I rendered a real-world, 90-minute, two-camera HDV project to DVD-compatible MPEG-2, and the Z800 was 100 percent faster than the xw8600. If you’re producing long-form HDV-based projects, the Z800 provides a very meaningfully performance boost.
Farther to the right, the dramatic difference between the 64-bit xw8600 and 32-bit xw6600 in the longer project indicates that if you’re running 32-bit Windows on a workstation that you can expand up to 8GB of RAM or so, the investment will definitely be worth it. Finally, if you’re producing longer HDV projects on a single- or dual-processor computer (and you know who you are), you should definitely consider upgrading to at least an inexpensive 64-bit Nehalem-based system such as the Z400.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any XDCAM HD footage inhouse to test (anyone from Sony out there?), but since HDV is the closest format to XDCAM HD (both Long-GOP MPEG-2) these results are likely to be the most analogous.
OK, that’s all for this installment; tune in two weeks from now to see results for DVCPRO HD, AVCHD, and Red.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.